Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

Love water, protect it:

Worry is a form of fear.

Nobody beats the market, they say. Except for those of those of us who do.

Nobody really knows who I am, where I came from, what's in my heart, why I believe in the things I believe, what I see behind the scenes and they don't see.

When you are bigger than your purpose you have a career. When your purpose is bigger than you, you have a calling.

I lived in Texas for 10 years. There were a lot of people chewing, including my dad.

You gotta look for the good in the bad, the happy in your sad, the gain in your pain, and what makes you grateful not hateful.

Wizards was my homage to Tolkien in the American idiom. I had read Tolkien, understood Tolkien, and wanted to do a sort of fantasy for American kids, and that was Wizards.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.